


Night at the Museum

by richmahogany



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Meandering Exposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 07:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1336975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/richmahogany/pseuds/richmahogany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harold reflects on what he had then and what he has now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night at the Museum

**Author's Note:**

> Pure introspection, no action. And it's a bit sad, but not entirely so.

Harold looked over the ledge of the balcony down into the foyer. The security guard was just locking the door after the last visitor. One of the cleaners had already started to empty the trashcans, while another was plugging in the buffer. It wasn’t late, but darkness was already falling on this cold November evening.

Harold liked the museum at any time, but he particularly enjoyed being here after closing time, when everything was quiet. He could look at anything he wanted without being jostled by the crowds or having his thoughts interrupted by someone speaking to him. Of course, his job as a docent here had been part of the identity that had died after his “accident”. It was too conceivable that Grace, being an artist, would talk to someone at the museum who knew him, and he couldn’t take that risk. As far as the museum’s management was concerned, he was dead. The security guard on the other hand was new and had no reason to question his possession of a staff card which gave him access to all areas of the museum. And any check he might care to run on the security system would reveal that “Harold Willet” had perfectly legitimate reasons to be in the museum after hours.

The security guard looked up and spotted Harold on the balcony. He waved a greeting, and Harold waved back. Then he turned round and went into the silent galleries. Slowly he walked past a row of paintings, taking in the familiar sights, letting the emotions wash over him. He had once overheard a conversation between a man and a woman looking at a picture. She had said, in a slightly disgusted tone: “I wouldn’t want to live with that!” He had replied: “I’m not interested in living with it. I’m interested in thinking about it.” He could relate to that, Harold thought. In his mind, there was always a two-fold response to a work of art. There was an emotional reaction, but there was also an intellectual one, the “thinking about it” part. The two influenced each other, they were intertwined, dependent on each other, each necessary to the process of appreciation. Could you have one without the other? Was it possible to acknowledge the greatness of a work of art you didn’t particularly like? Was it possible to have a strong emotional reaction to a painting you knew to be artistically without merit? He and Grace had discussed these questions with great passion, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. Regardless of any theorizing, though, they had discovered that they had the same reactions to the same works of art. It was one of the things that drew them together and made them so happy in each other’s company.

Harold stopped in front of one of the paintings. This was the one he had given to Grace as a birthday gift. Not that she ever knew that it owed its presence in the museum to him. She loved this painting so much, and for him it was a great pleasure to give her the opportunity to see it whenever she wanted. They had visited the painting together a number of times, and he knew that she still came to see it now and then. As did he, on his occasional lonely evenings in the museum. Harold knew that it didn’t do him any good, but he couldn’t stay away. It was the closest he could come to Grace these days. But as he stood there and let himself be drawn into the picture, he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Grace had been his anchor in the real world. She was so straightforward, open, innocent. There was nothing hidden, everything she said or did was completely honest and true. He on the other hand had lived a life of secrecy and subterfuge for so long that he felt like a ghost. He didn’t feel part of the real world anymore, he just drifted through it, adopting this identity or that, only for them to dissolve the moment anyone came too close.

It had made for a solitary life, but Harold had always been a solitary person. His parents had pretty much left him to his own devices from an early age. He didn’t have any friends at school either, but on the whole his schooldays hadn’t been so bad. Ordinarily a small, bespectacled bookworm would have been a prime target for bullies, and there were a few ugly incidents, but most of the time he was left alone. He just didn’t seem to attract anyone’s attention, so everybody pretty much ignored him. Even the teachers seemed surprised at his presence whenever he said something in class, which happened rarely enough. This lack of attention suited him. It meant he could sit at the back and do his own thing. That was more profitable than following the lessons, given that he usually was ahead of the others anyway. By the time his classmates had made their laborious way to Chapter Three, he would have read the whole book. He loved learning, provided he could do it under his own steam. He hated being spoon-fed snippets of knowledge by the teachers, which he was supposed to regurgitate in tests. But because learning came so easy to him, he passed the tests to everybody’s satisfaction, while still having enough time to study what he wanted. He also discovered that in most people’s perception, the subjects were divided roughly into two areas. On one side were the sciences: math, physics, biology etc. On the other side were the “soft” subjects: music, art, literature. It also became clear that boys were supposed to do well in the “hard” sciences, while girls were expected to gravitate towards the more artistic areas.  For Harold, this division didn’t exist. If he had to name his favorite subject, he would probably have said mathematics. But he loved math because he could see the beauty behind the equations, and it was that same beauty he discovered elsewhere. It was in music and in art, and yes, there was math in music, and there was music in the numbers if you knew how to look at them. He also loved language and literature, which was supposed to be on the other side of the divide. But he was fascinated by words, how they could conjure up pictures and emotions, and how different writers used them in different ways. To him it was all part of the same magic, and to choose between one side or the other would have been absurd. The fact that his interests were so broad had a practical use as well. It meant that he got good grades across the board, which made it easier to get into the university of his choice. When he did, even though there had been nothing particularly bad about his childhood and schooldays, he somehow felt compelled to start completely afresh. Things were going to be very different at college, so wouldn’t it be better if he was different as well? And so he had left home as one person and arrived at university as another.

There of course he had met Nathan, and for the first time in his life he had a true friend. They couldn’t have been more different, but somehow each saw in the other something they valued. They also realized that their talents complemented each other perfectly, and together they could achieve great things. Which they did, after a fashion. Up to a point. Until it all went wrong.

With Nathan gone, and Grace lost to him, Harold was cut adrift again. Nathan’s death had hit him hard, but in a way the separation from Grace was even harder to bear. When someone dies, you grieve for a while, then slowly things turn back to normal. You move on, even though you never forget the person you lost. But at least things are clear, there’s a “before” and there’s an “after”, and you just deal with it. With Grace, there was no such turning point for him. She wasn’t gone, she was still there, separated from him by an invisible wall. He could not accept her loss and move on because she wasn’t lost. And what made it worse was that he had to hurt her so much and couldn’t even apologize to her. He had always lied to her, not about things that really mattered in their relationship, just enough to keep her shielded from the work he was doing. But to let her think he was dead was the biggest lie of all, and it broke both their hearts. If only he could somehow let her know that he was alive, if he could explain why he had to leave her! He supposed that one day she would be the one to move on. She would meet someone new, she would fall in love again, and even though she would not forget him (he hoped), she would get on with her life. Harold dreaded that day, because for him it would be like losing her all over again. At the same time, though, he would probably be relieved that she had found some happiness again, and he hoped he would find it in him to be happy for her. She did not deserve to spend the rest of her life alone, haunted by the memories of a dead fiancé. He could deal with being alone. He had been prepared to spend his whole life alone, and he was grateful for the few years of companionship that had been given to him. Grace had come into his life at a time when he had long given up any thoughts of a relationship, and the time they had together was so precious to him that the pain he had to live with now and in future was a price he willingly paid. He could deal with it.

A twinge in his back told Harold that he had been standing in the same uncomfortable position for too long. He tore his gaze away from the painting and walked slowly on, into a different gallery, where he could sit down. Here was another painting he liked: a man was walking across a wintry landscape, accompanied by his dog. It wasn’t a romantic Christmas card landscape of snowy hills and frosted trees. Most of the snow seemed to have melted on the bare field, leaving mud, puddles and clumps of dead grass. A dull purplish sky was threatening more snow. It could have been a depressing picture, but it wasn’t. He’s lucky, thought Harold, at least he’s got his dog. And then it occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t completely alone either. What about John Reese? Well, for one thing he would never tell him about this particular train of thought!

John Reese. He would have to call him a friend, he supposed. He wasn’t quite sure what he was. It had started out as a straightforward employer-employee relationship. Harold had hired John to do the things he wasn’t able to do and paid him for it. That was it. But things had taken an unexpected turn in more ways than one. Harold had deliberately chosen a man who was even more broken than he was, thinking that it would make it easier to use him the way he wanted. Break them down, then build them up, like they did in the Marines. Except someone else had done the breaking for him. Harold had hoped that by giving John a new purpose in life, a certain sense of gratitude would bind him to the job and compel him to do it well. What Harold hadn’t expected was that John attached his gratitude to him personally. To John, Harold appeared as some kind of savior, and he realized after a while that John would do absolutely anything for him. More than that, John appeared to be protective of him. It wasn’t just that he was keen to keep his job, which after all paid extremely well – he cared for Harold’s well-being because he liked him. Harold had tried from the start to keep John at arm’s length, which had worked in the beginning, but soon John began to push at the boundaries that Harold had put up, trying to get closer. Harold found this extremely annoying, but there was a very small voice at the back of his mind that whispered: “Isn’t it nice to know that someone – probably the only person in the whole world – actually cares about you in some way?”

And then one day Harold had realized something else that took him by surprise. When he had hired John, he had hired him for the job and nothing else. He was an employee, an asset, and as such had to be taken care of, but ultimately he was expendable, replaceable. It would cost time and effort to find someone else and train them up, but then the work would go on as before. Except that Harold had suddenly found that John was not replaceable at all. He couldn’t remember what actually made him realize that, but he knew that if John was killed (in their line of work, something they had to reckon with almost daily), he would miss him. Not because of the work that would remain undone, but because he would leave a gap his life. He had hired John because of his skills, and found he wanted to keep him because of his personality. Quite simply, he had come to like John. Harold didn’t know whether to call this friendship or not, or how their relationship was going to develop, but whatever it was, he was glad to have it.

Even so, theirs was still primarily a work relationship, and on an evening like this, with nothing more urgent to do, they had gone their separate ways. John had gone on what sounded like a date, and Harold had gone to the museum. Even if John was something like a friend, he was not yet a friend like Nathan had been. With Nathan, he would discuss life, the universe and everything. Nor was he a friend like Grace, who had been – he disliked the word, but could not think of a better description – his soulmate. The relationship with John was much more complicated, more like a delicate balancing act – two broken men alone in the world, who were slowly realizing that maybe there was someone out there to hold on to, but were not entirely sure of each other yet.

A sudden noise startled Harold. He looked up and saw that the security guard had come into the room.

“Hey, I didn’t know you were still here. Everything alright?”

“Yes, yes…” Harold replied, quickly gathering his thoughts. “Apparently a visitor pointed out a mistake on one of the labels, and I was just checking it out. I’ll be going in a minute.”

“Sure, take your time.” With that the security guard left again. Harold could hear his footsteps receding down the corridor until everything was silent again.

He was alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I have never been to the museum myself, so I've taken some liberties with the locations of paintings and seats. The picture of the man with his dog in the wintry landscape is by Vincent van Gogh.  
> The man and the woman talking about a picture are actually detectives Goren and Eames. I stole that bit of dialogue from a LOCI episode.


End file.
